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By Laura Legere (Staff Writer)
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Published: May 20, 2012

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Riverside High School seniors Gary Lukasiewicz and his prom date Taylor Berto, both 18, relax at their senior prom on Friday night at the Radisson at Lackawanna Station hotel. Photo courtesy of a Riverside High School teacher.

Gary Lukasiewicz fulfilled the three-word wish that thousands prayed for him and celebrated his last night at a dance.

The 18-year-old Riverside High School senior class president died Saturday morning after a struggle with a rare form of cancer that galvanized his community and inspired thousands beyond it with a Twitter campaign, #keepfightinggary.

On Saturday, the day after Gary donned a white tuxedo and attended his prom long enough to be crowned king, the message of hope still flashed on a billboard on Davis Street, filled the rear window of a pickup truck parked in Scranton and spread across the Internet, as it had for two weeks.

"Our hearts go out to his family and we're keeping all of our Riverside family in our prayers at this time," Riverside School District Superintendent David A. Woods said after he learned of Gary's death Saturday morning.

Hundreds of friends, family members, teachers and classmates attended a prayer service Saturday night at Divine Mercy Parish on Davis Street. The prayer services that started with about 15 of his closest friends on May 6 became a nightly vigil.

On Saturday, it was a good-bye gathering.

The Rev. Francis Pauselli sat on the steps of the altar near a purple jersey printed with the words "Keep Fighting Gary" and remembered the boy he said was as close to a son as he could have.

The priest had given Gary last rites on a bad night two weeks ago, he said, and the length of time he lived was the first miracle.

There were others: the fact that he attended the prom, not for 15 minutes, as the hospice nurse suggested he should, but for nearly an hour. The fact that he could put on his tuxedo coat at all.

"Maybe the miracle that happened was that we came together," Father Pauselli said. "I think Gary taught us valuable lessons about life that people who live to be 90 will never teach."

Gary was a hockey goalie, ranked fourth in his class and was enrolled at Villanova University for the fall. He had battled back his cancer once after being diagnosed shortly before his junior year at Riverside. It returned and Gary entered hospice care this spring.

Feeling hopeless, his friends began to send out bytes of hope instead. The Twitter messages numbered tens of thousands.

Outside the church on Saturday, his friend Nick Dranchak, a Riverside junior who grew up in the same neighborhood and played sports with Gary, was wearing a T-shirt he got at a football camp that morning. It said "Never give up" on the back.

"Gary. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw it," he said. "I thought about getting another shirt."

He learned later, at lunch, that Gary had died.

"I'm relieved right now," Gary's friend Stephanie Tilberry, a Riverside senior, said. "I just wanted him to be in peace. He hadn't had that in so long."

People had been proud of the students for how they came together in their grief and shared their friend with the world.

But "we didn't do anything," she said. "It was all Gary. He did this."

Staff writer Robbie Ward contributed to this story.

Contact the writer: llegere@timesshamrock.com

Your story, your tweets: See how Gary's friends remembered him on Twitter:#RIPGary

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